Saturday, August 08, 2009

The weird thing is that -- looking at everyone's photos on the reunion website -- I find that I don't remember most of these folks at all, not even their names. It was a fairly big class (550), and it was heavily tracked, so I hardly knew most of them even at the time.

No matter. I happen to be in town on the right night, so I might as well go and see the handful of people I do know, and swap memories.

When the class prom queen emailed everyone to ask for old photos from back then, I sent in this one:

It's three of the class nerds doing a summer job the Park & Rec Department as puppeteers. I'm the one on the left.

The funny part was when I was sending in the photo. I didn't recognize the name of the woman we were instructed to mail photos to, but -- even so -- I'm nearly 100% certain that she was one of the more popular girls who would have been above speaking to me back then. (It's a good bet -- I think a good 98% of the girls in the school were above me on the popularity ladder.) So I wondered how to close the email.

If this were a normal conference, thought I, I'd say "see you there." But the last time I saw these folks, such a thing would have been presumptuous...

Then I thought, to hell with it, we're all grown-ups now.

Naturally, she replied with an equivalent greeting. So I'll see her there tonight (though I'm still not quite sure who she is).

Actually, it almost seemed presumptuous to have sent in a photo me and my nerdy friends at all, but, hey, we were there too. Somewhere in the background. ;^)

That may be true. I've heard that the 10th is too close to the HS experience, so a lot of old juvenile social situations remain, but by the 20th, we're all grown-ups.

But I've also heard that they tend to get even better with more age, as everyone is just happy to hang out with anyone at all they can share youthful memories with. The few who are interested enough to go to the later reunions (like the 40th) often end up making new friends with people they didn't actually hang out with in HS...